Films like 28 Days Later or Resident Evil
represent zombies as insensate and monstrous. Zombies in Laurell
K. Hamilton’s novels are soulless by definition. Despite these
and other contemporary images of the zombie as flesh-eating and mindless,
the figure of the zombie, like that of the vampire, may be ripe for
moving from what Jules Zanger called metaphor to metonymy. Zanger cites
the vampires’ movement from embodiment of ‘supernal Evil’
to a new undead whose ‘evil acts are expressions of individual
personality and condition’ (18). Both Henry from Gerard Houarner’s
short story, ‘She’d Make a Dead Man Crawl’ and John
from the film Shadows of the Dead are zombies ennobled by their
post-death relationships with their lovers. The creatures’ potential
for love and expanded knowledge may make them less the monsters we fear
and more the monsters with whom we empathize. Like Zanger’s vampires’
movement from anti-Christ to ‘secular sinner’ or ‘social
deviant’, (19) these zombies harbor highly specific personalities
that inform, shape and control their desires.

Zombie lovers Henry and John come to know the wisdom of
the Shakespearean adage about love from the vantage point of their reawakening
from death. In ‘She’d Make a Dead Man Crawl’, protagonist
and Zombie/lover Henry is awakened by the beautiful conjure woman Phebe
at the crossroads. Henry, who has always felt an intense connection
to Phebe, ‘I’d always felt like I belonged to her’
wakes to suddenly find himself immersed in an intimate act that suggests
marriage, ‘this was the first time I ever felt like, maybe, she
belonged to me’ (193). This pseudo marriage of the living Phebe
to the dead Henry is officiated by the wonderfully ambiguous figure
of the black Dog. Like the crossroads themselves, the Dog is both physical
and metaphysical, itself a union of oppositions in cultures (Prometheus,
Mercury, Legba) and morals (Good/Bad). When the Dog asks Henry, “What
do you need to learn?” the stage is set for Henry’s union
with the woman he loved, loves, and will continue to love. He initially
answers, ‘What am I doing here?’ (192) When the Dog asks
him again, Henry’s later request is, ‘I want to know how
to make her love me’. (208) Henry’s un-death is a time of
ontological quest and personal growth via transcendent union. Through
his union with Phebe, Henry will be granted a special social status,
discover a sense of his own identity, engage his personal creativity,
and eventually find a transcendent unity with the earth. By the end
of the story, ‘My heart’s all over the ground, in bits and
pieces, melting into the earth like the rest of me, feeding the brush
and the trees and the squirrels and mice and birds and bugs that come
along’. (211) Henry’s evolution begins with his own murder
at the hands of Phebe and includes his murder of Phebe. This may not
be a marriage made in heaven, but it is a union of the physical to the
metaphysical that engages its participants in rituals leading to self-knowledge
and atonement. Henry is a contemporary zombie with a modern lover, enacting
an antique, courtly form of romance.(1)

Like a medieval knight engaged in a courtly love that
is both physical and metaphysical, Henry is literally both murdered
and awakened from death by his lover. Fittingly, he is spiritually perfected
by his union with her, although it means his corporeal demise. Human
love (greedy, excessive, selfish, obsessive, corporeal and emotionally
messy) leads Zombie Henry to a final philosophical and physical integration
with the universe. He moves from an inactive, wasted, unexamined life
between worlds to an active embrace of his desires, and through those
intellectual choices and physical actions, he reaches contemplative
acceptance of universal truth. When the Dog leaves him a final time,
‘he gave me a lick, but didn’t offer to teach me anything,
and I didn’t ask’. (211) Henry has ‘got a taste of
what I needed, learned everything I wanted to, and more’. (211)
Satiated with understanding, Henry has found his own way home through
the status of both zombie and lover.

In Shadows of the Dead, John may never realize
the Holy Grail of atonement with the natural world through his love
of Zombie Jennifer, but he does come to understand the finality of death,
learning the chivalric lesson of Bonte or pity. (2)
His early statement that he is the same person in death that he was
in life is, unfortunately, initially true. In the opening sequence of
the film, John is hoping to snatch a few of Jennifer’s French
fries as they drive toward their lovers’ retreat. She castigates
him for not ordering his own and then planning on taking what is hers.
Alive or dead, John has a greedy appetite. When John bites Jennifer
on the neck, transmitting the infection to her against her will, the
young zombie is simply acting on his appetite in much the same way he
did as a living man. This avarice is the greatest obstacle to their
love, alive or dead. (3)

Railing against her fate, Jennifer tells her lover that
she has nothing left but regrets and accurately calls him a “selfish
bastard.” Despite his actions, the couple stays together, making
love, and enjoying the transitory moment. Like Tristan and Iseult, poised
in their hidden woodland bower, Jennifer and John’s bed is both
sublime and doomed. Their transcendence of their physicality, their
predicament, and their need for consumption of human flesh is exquisite,
if temporary. Jennifer tells John to close his eyes and remember their
past bodies. The lovers engage the past by reaching beyond their present
numbness, reanimating themselves metaphysically, even as their flesh
slips off the bones.

John makes an effective, if undead, courtly lover. His
eyes turned to milky cataracts by death, John nonetheless does come
to see himself reflected in Jennifer’s eyes. His love for Jennifer
becomes both the impetus and the vehicle for change. His physical decay
may appear to be at odds with his spiritual growth, but John’s
desire for her translates into a desire to become more for her. In the
classic courtly tradition he gives over (or claims to give over) agency
and control of his actions to his beloved. John, like Henry journeying
and gathering charms for his beloved conjure woman, earns and learns
a freedom through submission. Both medieval and masochistic, the lovers’
fusion of agency and passivity functions on both the erotic and philosophical
levels.

Lovers beyond sex, but trapped by their bodies, John and
Jennifer seek the numbness of narcotics stolen from a local hospital.
Working together, they secure and share a pharmacological space of peace
and respite, yet another temporary bower. The lovers move past their
sexual hunger for one another, eventually wearing clothing at all times.
Jennifer’s suicide is the shock that causes John to stop killing
people for food. After he experiences the (final) death of the one he
loves, he can no longer cause equivalent pain to the surviving families
of his prey. His selfishness and his appetites are only brought in check
when he has learned sympathy with the husbands, fathers, etc. of those
who have lost a love. He projects his undead experience upon the living,
to better know their pain. John’s loss of Jennifer is his bridge
to an understanding of both his own and his fellows’ essential
humanity.

Theoretically, Medieval Courtly Love could resurrect,
reform, and reconstitute the humanity of a hardened mercenary who killed
and destroyed for pay and glory. John, who says he feels the urge to
kill things, not out of anger, but necessity, establishes control over
the ‘necessity’ to kill. He handcuffs himself to a post
rather than attack the family who comes to his door for directions.
He rips free of the handcuffs, but the moment of stasis is his breakthrough
and the family escapes.

For a medieval, the experience of the sublime through
the vehicle of a physical lover was supposedly more compelling than
a person’s lust for glory, gold or God. When Jennifer comprehends
her zombie state she allows a golden crucifix to slip down the drain
and turns to John. She finds beauty in his deteoriating body, as well
as his recognition that ‘We have nothing . . .we only have each
other.’ Set against the permanence of heaven, illicit poetic love’s
potential impermanence has always been part of its exquisite, consuming
allure. Simultaneously spiritually transformative and the height of
self-absorption, courtly love redeems and purifies the violent nature
of killing man. In the case of contemporary Zombie Lovers Henry and
John, one man learns to kill and one resists killing at the behest of
his beloved. Both men love to the exclusion and expulsion of their respective
hungers, John for human flesh and Henry for his lover’s desire.

Henry moves from knowing she is always and forever beyond
his reach to having Phebe desire him above all else. He finally sees
himself, the object rather than the abject of Phebe’s desire,
and as she mirrors him, he comes to know himself through his lover.
Phebe’s death is both the consummation and the consumption of
their combined desire. Love bites. When the conjure woman tries to eat
the zombie, biting chunks out of his flesh, it is the successful apex
of Henry’s journey to self- knowledge and his final comprehension
of his beloved Phebe. He knows her in all her painful and pain-filled
hunger and it is through this experience that Henry embraces the world
of which he is a part. Henry finds freedom bound to and binding the
woman he considered far above himself. Like Henry himself, Phebe is
sacrificed to the power of self-recognition and its attendant self-transformation.

If Henry and John’s lives have been stolen by an
unsympathetic fate, their undeaths become second chances for their souls,
the very thing so many Zombies seem to lack. At the dawn of the 21st
century, Zombies who emote, form lasting relationships, as well as learn,
have risen alongside the mega consumers of modern society. These figures
are still the animated dead; they rot. Yet their experience of corporeal
undeath provides a unique venue for them to establish or extend love
relationships. Considering the classic definition of the Caribbean zombie
as an essentially human figure drugged and/or conjured into mindless
work, perhaps these characters’ ability to spiritually grow from
their experience is a statement or projection of hope. Love lasts; love
is more real than (and can even outlast) desire. In the hands of sloppy
humans (or even sloppier zombies) “Love can deny nothing to love.”
(4) Both Henry and John are engaged in downright
courtly relationships that function as psychic mirrors for their flaws
as both men and zombies.(5) Perhaps contemporary
audiences merely want romance in their undeath; perhaps courtly love
has always offered both perfection and death through the venue of a
woman’s love. (6)

The figure of the zombie, corporeally abject and an agent
of abject desires, is always set against normative societal expectations.
Whether it consumes human flesh (John) or folds and consumes the outrageous
objects of another’s desire (Henry), it acts in opposition to
laws of humankind and nature. Irreversibly alien, the figure seems lost
to reform. Wearing the flesh and bearing some memory of their lives,
Zombies are especially, wonderfully tragic. As writer Carl Lindbergh
states in Shadows of the Dead, ‘all great love stories
end tragically.’ This kinship of the tragic to the supernatural
is an obvious aspect of both the gothic and medieval romances. Courtly
love allowed for human beings to exist both within and exterior to the
natural world and its laws. Lovers’ unions routinely evoke supra
or supernatural events. (7) Super-human feats
are the routine assignment of the courtly lovers of medieval romance.
They transcend the laws of the natural world, just as they do the conventions
of authority. It is part of their romance. Their negotiations with the
supernatural or the inexplicable, like the injuries they suffer at the
hands of fate, define their humanity, rather than obscure it.

In terms of humanity, vampires and werewolves are clearly
cursed and, although they make others suffer through their suffering,
there is often the potential that their curse is a separate thing from
the obscured or damaged person. Perhaps the curse could be broken? However,
Zombies don’t de-zombify and, like humans, they are trapped by
time. Perhaps because they are so completely bereft of hope they offer
a potential innocence, or even purity. As Laurel Hamilton writes, ‘Zombies
are very honest . . .they don’t lie’ (29). Like many human
lovers, Zombies embody desire, although that honest desire may ruin
the body it inhabits.

In the real world ‘transformation’ is likely
to mean corrective plastic surgery, hair plugs, or the gym, and ‘transcendence’
is a sign of willpower, education, or geographic transition. By comparison,
fictional zombie characters transform and transcend in startlingly authentic
ways, shucking off their bodies without denying the physical/metaphysical
desire that motivates and finally frees their souls. Like contemporary
live couples, Zombie lovers hunger both for one another and for the
life they can’t quite achieve. Alive or dead, no one begins by
being satisfied with his or her body. Dead, bound by the reality of
their bodies, Henry and John die again, but their animating spirits
and personalities are ennobled by having experienced the transcendent
union of the undead.

Notes
1While courtly love or fin’amour varies from romance
to romance and still stirs critical controversy concerning whether it
was a serious, real social practice or a hypothetical, primarily fictional
theme, the concept of a knight refined in manner and spirit by his passionate
love for a lady is a well documented motif in medieval European poetry
and prose.

2 A good measure of a male lover’s evolution can
be found in Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, a 14th-century
discussion of noble, chivalric behavior which cites ten characteristics
of both internal and external gentilesse. John’s development
is especially apparent in terms of the internal aspects of gentility:
Trouthe (Loyalty, Faithfulness) and Bonte (Pity).
His engagement with truth is the journal that gives witness to his and
Jennifer’s experiences as the undead. Eventually, although it
means his own discorporation, John grows a conscience. He develops sympathy,
empathy and a willingness to forgive, all of which constitute Bonte.

3 John might have benefited from the 12th-century Andreas
Cappellanus’s ‘Art of Courtly Love, Book Two: 10)’:
‘Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.’

4 This concept is ‘rule’ 30 from Cappellanus’s
‘Rules of Courtly Love’.

5 Perhaps what Laurel K. Hamilton’s monster hunter
Anita Blake suggests of vampires can be applied to zombies, ‘Just
being dead doesn’t cure you of any problems you had as a live
human being.’ (50)

6 Love in the Western World explores courtly
love as an expression of thantos as much as a link to eros
in the literature and art of Medieval Europe.

7 From Marie of France’s famous intertwining of
vine and tree in The Honeysuckle to the magical potion that
links the fate of Tristan and Iseult, courtly lovers’ passions
seem to change or reconstitute the usual pattern of the natural world.

Works Cited
Capellanus, Andreas, The Art of Courtly Love. The Medieval Sourcebook,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/capellanus.html